Peter F. Hamilton

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Peter F. Hamilton is a British science fiction writer most famous for his Night's Dawn trilogy. The last book in his Void Trilogy following up the Commonwealth Saga, The Evolutionary Void, was released in September 2010.

Hamilton is known for blending Space Opera with hard science-fiction, often combined with the bizarre. For example, his Night's Dawn trilogy is a Space Opera epic that takes a Space Is an Ocean approach that is pretty diamond hard on the scale, and throws in a plague of the souls of the returning dead. Much, much Better Than It Sounds.

His Commonwealth Saga, on the other hand, takes the unusual approach of an interstellar Portal Network...based on railway travel: taking a train from a station on one planet and arriving at a station on another. Spaceships don't come into play until seriously long distances need to be covered. Oh, and then there's the unstoppable galactic-scale Alien Invasion taking out dozens of star systems at a time.

The Void Trilogy is the latest series, taking place in the same continuity as the Commonwealth Saga, thousands of years later. The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is discovered to be an "artificial universe", the Void, that is gradually consuming the galaxy to fuel the outlandish Mind Over Matter powers of its denizens. A major religious cult in the Commonwealth decides to pilgrimage into the Void, an action which might trigger an expansion that could destroy the galaxy. Oh, and The Messiah can dream the life of Edeard, one of the humans that lived in the Void hundreds of years prior, and his sharing of these dreams are the foundation of his cult.

Be warned, though: almost everything he writes is a Doorstopper Space Opera with Loads and Loads of Characters, and in recent years this has only gotten more pronounced. It is also worth noting that almost everything he has written has been extremely well received.


Works written by Peter F. Hamilton include:


  • Greg Mandel Trilogy
    • Mindstar Rising
    • A Quantum Murder
    • The Nano Flower
  • Confederation Universe
    • The Night's Dawn Trilogy
      • The Reality Dysfunction
      • The Neutronium Alchemist
      • The Naked God
    • Others in the Confederation Universe
      • A Second Chance at Eden
      • The Confederation Handbook
  • Other novels
    • Fallen Dragon